“Go Eat a Peach”: Neil Young’s Short and Sweet Way of Leaving a Tour With Stephen Stills

Neil Young is many things, but above all else, he is a man who doesn’t do anything he doesn’t want to do—which is why he had no qualms about leaving a tour with Stephen Stills at the drop of a hat. When the rest of the band’s caravan turned right toward the gig, Young had his bus driver turn left. Then, he sent a telegram.

Even while abruptly quitting a national tour with his friends, Young managed to sneak some sly humor into his farewell message.

Neil Young Left His Tour With Stephen Stills Via Telegram

Neil Young and Stephen Stills’ spontaneous national tour sans their other bandmates, David Crosby and Graham Nash, ended as quickly as it began. As Nash later recalled in his memoir Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life, he got a bit of smug satisfaction from hearing that a tour he was excluded from took such a sharp downward turn. “Seems that it was snakebit from the star,” Nash wrote.

“With too little time to rehearse, the band never felt comfortable onstage. A review in the New York Times called the show “an ill-conceived evening,” blaming the sound, which was “rough and overly loud.” The tour needed work. Stephen wanted to stick to a set list until the band got tight, but that apparently bored Neil.”

“Eventually,” Nash continued, “Neil reverted to being Neil. Heading to a gig in Atlanta, he was traveling in his bus down the highway when the driver put on his left turn signal to go to the gig. Neil insisted they go right instead. ‘But Neil, the gig is to the left,’ the driver assured him.’ Neil got right in his face. ‘I said turn right!’ The next day, at the gig in Atlanta, Neil just never turned up.”

A telegram did, though. It read, “Funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach. Love Neil.” That was that.

The Songwriter Doesn’t Do What He Doesn’t Feel Like Doing

In a 2024 interview with AXS TV, Neil Young discussed the moment he left the tour with Stephen Stills via telegram. The glib “peach” comment, he argued, was simply because the band was headed to Atlanta, Georgia, the Peach State. (Leave it to Young to squeeze in some ironic humor in what was essentially a tour breakup telegram.)

“The tour was going okay, but it wasn’t going well,” Young explained. “I did not want to continue the tour. I’m spoiled. When I don’t want to do something, I stop doing it. Just like when I want to do something, I’ll do it until I’m finished, you know, unless somebody stops me somehow. But it’s not easy to stop me. That’s just the way I am.”

“It wasn’t going well for whatever reasons, and it was not a good thing,” he continued. “I just decided that was it for me.” Clearly, the peachy telegram didn’t cause too much of a fuzz, er, fuss, between the two musicians—at least in the long term, anyway.

While it’s reasonable to assume there was some tension in the Atlanta venue when they realized their co-headliner wasn’t going to be there, Young and Stills maintained a close relationship. In fact, at the time of his AXS TV interview, Young was set to play a show with Stills the next day. Peaches not required.

Photo by Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns